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Adobe Photoshop Elements 8

From: Adobe
Category: Software

List Price: ~~$99.99~~
Buy New: $64.79
as of 7/30/2010 07:53 CDT details
You Save: $35.20 (35%)

New (48) Used (3) from $54.97

Seller: We luv Satisfaction !
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

reviews
Sales Rank: 13

Format: CD-ROM
Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows
Media: DVD-ROM
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Operating System: Windows
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.8 x 1.5
Legal Disclaimer: ConsumerElectronics

MPN: 65045174
Model: 65045174
UPC: 883919176635
EAN: 0883919176604
ASIN: B002ID8R3Y

Release Date: October 13, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

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Features:

•	Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 combines power and simplicity so you can easily go beyond the basics to tell great stories with your photos
•	Make your photos look extraordinary with easy-to-use editing options--whiten teeth, recompose photos, remove unwanted elements and more
•	Share your stories in beautiful, personalized print creations and web experiences, and share on popular devices
•	Easily manage and protect all your photos and video clips from one convenient place
•	Enjoy automatic online backup with 2GB of free storage, and access your photos and videos anywhere you are

Accessories:

X-Rite ColorChecker Passport

Extraordinary photos. Amazing stories.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 software offers a complete solution for photos:

Make your photos look extraordinary with easy-to-use editing options.
Share your stories in beautiful, personalized print creations and web experiences, and share on popular devices.
Easily manage and protect all your photos and video clips from one convenient place.
Enjoy automatic online backup with 2GB of free storage, and access your photos and videos anywhere you are.*

Top reasons to buy Adobe Photoshop Elements 8

The toolbar says it all.

Quickly recompose your photos to any size. Click to enlarge.

Clean up and create composites with Photomerge. Click to enlarge.

People Recognition automatically identifies the people in your photos.

Showcase your photos in one-of-a-kind Online Albums, photo books, and more. Click to enlarge.

Do it all with one powerful yet easy-to-use product
Use Photoshop Elements 8 for all your photo needs. Manage, edit, and enhance photos; make unique photo creations; share in print, on the web, and on popular devices; protect photos with automatic online backup and 2GB of free storage*--enough for up to 1,500 photos or 24 minutes of DVD-quality video; and view photos anywhere you are.*

Experience the ultimate media management hub
Bring all your photos and video clips together in one convenient place, and easily find your best stuff fast. Then dive into a full range of creative activities and start enjoying your memories.

Go from flawed to phenomenal in seconds
Get just the photo fixes you're looking for with one-step shortcuts that whiten teeth and make skies a vibrant blue. And now, when you perform one-step photo adjustments--including color, contrast, and lighting--you can quickly choose the best result from a group of adjustment previews.

Go from flawed to phenomenal in seconds.

Adjust color, contrast, and lighting.

Whiten teeth.

Make skies a vibrant blue.

Dramatically transform your photos with easy-to-use options
Convert your color originals to elegant, nuanced black-and-whites, or use color curves adjustments to get the perfect exposure.

Count on step-by-step assistance
Want to touch up a scratch? Create a scrapbook page? Add artistic effects that make a photo look like a pencil sketch? Get help with key steps to get the results you want fast.

Easily create the perfect photo
Take advantage of amazing Adobe Photomerge technology to easily remove distracting elements from photos in just a few clicks, create perfect group shots and seamless panoramas, and combine elements of different faces for entertaining results.

Get creative inspiration
Bring your ideas to life with relevant tutorials that appear just when you need them. New tutorials help you explore creative possibilities.

Share experiences in fresh, exciting ways on the web
Showcase your photos in one-of-a-kind Online Albums with your choice of animated templates, including all-new options for sharing photos and videos together. Adobe Flash technology lets viewers interact with your photos for an entertaining experience. And share via public or private galleries--friends and family won't have to register to look.*

Show off your creativity with flexible layouts
Make amazing printed photo creations--like scrapbook pages, photo books, and cards--that you can customize to get exactly the look you envision. Get fun, fresh looks with new artwork and templates.

Top new benefits of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8

Recompose photos to any size--without distortion
Ever want to change the size or orientation of a photo to fit a certain frame? Now you can quickly resize--even going from landscape to portrait or vice versa--without distorting key subjects like people or buildings.

Get the best exposure
Want to capture all the details in a scene that includes light and dark areas? Snap one photo with flash on and one with flash off, and Photomerge Exposure will combine the shots into a single, perfectly lit photo.

Quickly find your best photos
No need to click through dozens or hundreds of shots to find the good ones. The Auto-Analyzer automatically tags your media so you can easily find your most interesting, highest quality photos and video footage.

Find specific people in a flash
Quickly find photos that feature specific friends or family members thanks to People Recognition, which automatically identifies the people in your photos.

Get the big picture
See the full effect of your photos and video clips from within the Organizer with new full-screen previews, which let you make quick edits to photos while viewing them.

See the same photos and video clips on every computer
Forget trying to manually maintain your photos and video clips across multiple computers. With automatic syncing, media added or edited on one computer will automatically be synced to another.*

Give your creations fresh looks
Experiment with new artwork and templates to give your printed creations fun and stylish new looks.

Enjoy support for Windows 7
Take advantage of support for the new Windows 7 platform and the hands-on capabilities of Windows Touch technology.

* Available in the United States only. Internet access required. Also available at Photoshop.com; no purchase necessary.

Customer Reviews:

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Some new twists on PSE 7.0 make this a worthy upgrade October 14, 2009
Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA)
608 out of 646 found this review helpful

Ok, let's start with the top question: Do you or I really need another upgrade of Photoshop Elements? Is it vastly different than (6.0 or 7.0) and should this be my digital photo editing and organizing software of choice? I will cover the main points of the changes from Version 6.0 and 7.0 in this review. I have also reviewed Photoshop Premiere Elements 8 which is the video editor, and comes as a package option with Photoshop Elements 8.

Photoshop Elements has two components-- an editor, where you do your digital picture manipulation, and a file organizer or album where you store and retrieve your images. The interface for the editor is the same whether or not you use Mac or Windows, so if you are switching from one OS (say, MAC's at school, Windows at home) you will be very comfortable with Photoshop Elements. Where the systems differ, however, is in the file organizer and this is understandable; the Organizer function involves organizing and retrieving files, so this is going to be different depending on your computer operating system.

Since I don't have access to a MAC, and since I don't know much about them, I'm going to be reviewing the Windows version only from here on in this review. For your information, I'm currently using Windows Vista 64 Home Premium Edition.

My computer system used for this test is an HP Pavilion with an AMD Athlon 64X2 2.70 Dual Core CPU 5200+. I have 4 GB of RAM. The Video card is NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 wtih 128 MB of video memory. This is an on-board video card (on the motherboard) and if you are doing heavy image work, and video, you might want a separate, more capable video card.

Minimum PC Requirements:

Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7
1.6GHz or faster processor
1GB RAM (MINIMUM means MINIMUM; you really will need 2GB of ram to be comfy)
2GB available hard disk space
Microsoft DirectX 9
Color monitor with 16-bit color video card
Internet Access for online features and help

One immediate, small but great change from Version 7.0 is that when the software is initially booted up, the Welcome Screen is rearranged; on the left side: simple buttons EDIT or ORGANIZE. On the right, access to tutorials and underneath, info on your Photoshop online account (space available, links to your personal URL and online organizer.) Version 7.0 had tab buttons along the top of the welcome screen and was visually more confusing. THIS IS A GREAT IMPROVEMENT. THANK YOU.

A big change from Version 6.0 is the workspace, which is now dark gray in color (I actually don't like this--the gray is depressing, but I understand visually it is far less distracting and lets you focus on your editing job.) The workspace is now adjustable. However, if you are a change-o-phobic or just habit-bound, you can return the settings to look and feel like previous versions, for example, the fixed-window workspace of Version 6.0 can be retrieved in the Application Frame in the preferences window. There are other big changes, mainly the organizer, the online content, the personal online space and some editing tools; more about these further on in this review.

In addition to the change to the Welcome Screen, there are changes to the interface where you access your tools. The palettes have been renamed as "panels" so I got confused a bit again. I've been using Palettes for years with editing software; palettes of filters, layers, colors. So, now, they are PANELS, and you can do this right in the panel itself at the bottom. This is also a significant change from Version 6.0 (7.0 does have it.) The big change to 7.0 however, is that the layer controls are now their own panel below the Layers panel. The old dialog boxes are being replaced by these drop-down panels.

Getting down to brass tacks; the biggest change from 6.0 to either version 7.0 or now 8.0 by far, is the Organizer. Not only is there an automatic "organize my images for me" feature, but there is an optional online storage feature that has many uses. The main change from 7.0 to 8.0 has to do with an improved ability to add key word tags and to manage your media. If media management is an issue for you, this upgrade will be worth your while.

Another big change in Version 8.0: do you open multiple files at a single session? (I often download a photo session from say, a parade or one event.) Beforehand, you'd have to go to the file list in "Open Files" and pick which ones or all the ones you want, and try to scroll through them at the bottom to find the photo you want. Now you can open multiple files and use tabs to switch between them. This is huge. If you don't like point-and-click, you can employ a keyboard shortcut of Command-~ (tilde) to page through the open files.

The main change to Version 8.0 is the Organizer. When you boot up the software and have those choices, Edit or Organize, initially you are asked to set up an online account at Photoshop.com. You don't HAVE to do this. And you are then asked if you want to organize your photos, and this is the real advantage; the system combs through your hard drive and pulls up your images, and organizes them (like Picasa and other organizing programs) into a set of albums. The last six months are available with a single click, or you can organize by other means.

If you key-word tag your photos when saving them, and use the Smart Tags (everything from photo quality (good, bad, over, underexposed, face, etc) to event tags, you can create albums and quickly export them to DVD,CD, online albums, or hard drive. If you do a lot of image work and don't want your main hard drive cluttered with images, or if you want to back up your images onto an external drive, this is very handy. The organizer is one major reason to move from 6.0 to 8.0. Organizing a large number of photographs is made seamless and easy with the organizer that appeared in Version 7.0. I didnt think Id need it, but I do need it and I use it. In fact, I need to get better at using the tag feature. This is very good for the increasingly difficult task of finding and retrieving older photos.

You get 2GB free storage online at Adobe Photoshop.com's site, so if you sign up (as is suggested in the Welcome Screen), you can have an offsite, online backup. If 2GB is not enough storage for you, you can pay for Plus membership. Plus Membership starts at around twenty bucks (at this time) and you can go from 20GBmb (about 4 hours of video storage) to 40, 100, 250 or 500GB of storage, with prices rising accordingly. There are other perks such as advanced tutorials, and some bonus art and video effects, but the main reason for upgrading from free is to obtain much more online storage. I used some of the themes for the slide show and there are a few included, so the temptation is very strong to spring for the extra twenty bucks, get the ten-fold increase in storage (easy to fill it up) as well as the larger selection of themes. If you use Premiere, the adjunct video editing, you get increased storage for videos, and movie theme materials for "instant movies." I will be reviewing Premiere 8.0 separately, but you can see that if you intend to use the complete image-plus-video package, you probably will want a Plus membership. I was surprised to find out (me, the minimalist) that I did also want the upgrade. Film buffs and Youtube fanatics will want the extra storage; video takes a lot of space, and you are permitted to upload a video of up to 2GB with basic membership.

In version 7.0, Adobe introduced a much-improved Photomerge funtion. I use this function a lot to make composite photos as well as panoramas and other interesting landscape creations and group photos. I was not happy with the previous Photomerge in versions 6.0 and prior, but I used it a lot as a shortcut to cut-and-paste multiple images to make a composite. Version 8.0 improves Photomerge and adds a very interesting and useful feature: you can combine several exposures to create the "perfect" digital exposure. Take one shot with flash and one without. (Yes, the no-flash shot is too dark; the flash shot is sometimes washed-out or the shadows look funny.) Using PhotomMerge Exposure, you can get a new, improved "best-of-both-worlds" photograph. Here's my take: if you have Version 7.0 and you do a lot of photography, this is worth the upgrade alone.

Two new editing tools, Recompose and Smart Brush, tools also are slick ways to merge and fix photos with a lot less fiddling around, or by using some smarts built into the software. For example, you can reformat a wide photograph, remove a lot of blank space and recompose it to have the figures closer together, but not distorted. I used to do this by a very involved cut-and-paste procedure, copying figures I wanted to move and covering over unsightly elements like road signs or utility poles; this is a lot faster though I still need to do some clever editing myself if a pole appears "growing" out of the top of a subject's head (a huge photographic boo-boo) or if there is some goofy kid mooning you or mugging a funny face in the background of the shot (I shouldn't be telling you this, but a fun way to ruin someone's vacation photograph is to sneak into the background as they compose their award-winning photo of the Eifel Tower or Mount Rushmore and cross your eyes and stick out your tongue. Kind of a human version of that intruding squirrel of internet fame.) Using Recompose, you can remove these offensive things more easily.

There are templates to make cards, calendars, frames and other artwork. I am not into that kind of thing, but it's there for those of you who do scrapbooking, especially digital scrapbooking or who make your own birthday cards or Christmas newsletters. I used the slideshow template and I loved it. I wanted more...but the themes as I mentioned previously, are limited in the basic, included online edition. You have to spring for Plus membership to expand those selections of themes.

No major changes to the filters. Pretty much the same as Version 6.0, with the changes to controlling the interface as I mentioned before. The biggest change to filters is in the smart brushes for photographs. I have been using the filters a great deal ever since Elements was introduced, to pre-compose paintings from my digital photos. They seem pretty much the same as in earlier versions though the adjustments are now easier to manipulate in the Filter Gallery.

This question comes up all the time: is 8.0 FASTER??? I didn't notice any difference loading 8.0 and 7.0. Definitely, versions 7.0 and 8.0 are much faster to load than 6.0, at least with my computer.

Re tutorials, manuals and help; as usual, help is online content though a pamphlet on Getting Started comes with the box of software. In addition to the online content for help, there is a "Tips and Tricks" hyperlink in the Welcome Screen (lower right). This takes you online to a web page with tutorials. The tutorials include what's new in Version 8.0, various help for video editing (this will be covered in my review of Premiere Version 8.0.) You can search for other tutorials, and even submit your own. Tutorials have a rating on the right (one to five stars.) When you click on a particular tutorial, you will see the author, a way to favorite it for future reference, and on the right, you can add your own rating of it.

Summary:

Version 8.0 has a few great new improvements over Version 7.0. It is not vastly different than 7.0 but the Recompose, PhotomMerge Exposure and some of the adjustments to the panels are advanced enough to make this a significant improvement if you like to do digital photography. It is quite different from Version 6.0 so if you have not upgraded and these features appeal to you, I think it would be well worth it to get the improved organizer and the improved tools.

Recommendation: If you are on 6.0 or earlier versions and your PC meets the minimum requirements, do upgrade to 8.0. If you are on Version 7.0 and employ the media organization, upgrade to 8.0

Joanna Daneman

5 out of 5 stars

Great tool for photo manipulation for average user December 17, 2009
Jem (MD, USA)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful

I've never owned an edition of Photoshop Elements before, so I cannot compare this to previous versions or how it compares as an upgrade. I have used Adobe Photoshop CS3 at work and wanted something like it at home. However, the full Photoshop program costs upwards of $500, and elements is under $100.

For the average home user like me, Elements is more than enough. I won't go into details of the program as reviewer Joanna and Amazon's specs cover all the key points. What I will mention is who should consider the full Photoshop program instead of elements - graphic design students and artistic professionals such as web designers, photographers and the like. The main advantages that the full version has over elements are more advanced layer style manipulation, color management, web features and advanced text formatting. Photoshop also allows CMYK and LAB color modes and features that work with high-bit images. Yet, these tools have a steep learning curve and most people won't need them. On the other hand, Elements has some advantages that are specifically valuable to the amateur and non-professional.

The most important tool (I think) isn't really about photo manipulation at all - the organizer. For people with lots of images such as family photos, vacation photos etc, Elements has an automatic "organize my images for me" feature. Plus, the optional online storage allows for backups and more space. Keyword tagging helps users manage their photo library, allowing for easy searching and sharing in slide shows, video CDs, cards, email, calendars, and the list goes on. Tools such as the cookie cutter, drop in frames, and automatic red eye removal are all designed for the novice to jump right in. The program has a smaller learning curve and clean, well organized interfaces.

Overall, this is an excellent program for beginners, intermediates and those on a budget who can't afford the full blown Photoshop. Recommended.

5 out of 5 stars

REBATE IS SCAM January 12, 2010
Warm Fuzzy Kitten
14 out of 16 found this review helpful

This review is just for the rebate. Don't be fooled by the "lower price with rebate" because it's a scam. After I bought the Adobe item, I filled out the form and submitted all required documents for the rebate and mailed it in. I also made copies of all that I mailed in.

Well, very soon I get a letter saying that I didn't include original proof of purchase tag. I know that I did include it, and I made a copy of it too; I sent them that copy, but they told me that I need the original. They lied that they didn't get it, and scammed me out of the [...] rebate. I would buy another program just because of this, because the rebate people will do anything not to give you the rebate.

5 out of 5 stars

A great product and a terrific deal with the rebate offer October 28, 2009
M. Morton (Odessa, MO United States)
11 out of 14 found this review helpful

This is a fantastic photo editor and organization solution. I'm not sure why there are so many bad reviews. I had no problems at all. If there was one thing I would change, it would be to have two different launchers. One for the standard splash screen to select edit or organize and one launcher for the editor only. You can get around this by right-clicking on a photo file and select 'Open with' (Vista) and choosing the Photoshop editor. This will take you directly to the editor with the photo loaded and ready to go. This is the first "Elements" product I have owned, although I have used an older version of the regular Photoshop product. This is every bit as good for photo editing and much better in many ways. Overall I would highly recommend it to my friends.

5 out of 5 stars

No complaints - nice product January 12, 2010
Alan Holyoak (In the shadow of the Tetons)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful

I have used Photoshop Elements as my main image manipulation software for over 10 years. The latest installment, Photoshop Elements 8 includes a nice package of tools.

Before I get into that, you should know that I am not a professional photographer, etc., but I use this program mainly for image manipulation as I do image prep for inclusion in teaching presentations in college classrooms. This typically involves changing image sizes, cropping images, combining images, cropping, saving images from one format to another, and supporting biological illustration work I do from time to time - editing digitized illustrations, pen and ink drawings, labeling structures on them, etc.

I find Photoshop Elements 8 to be a nice product. It does everything I need to do, though it is not what I would call an immediately intuitive program.. In order to become comfortable with it you will need to learn about layers, combining layers, etc. Once you can make sense of that, things will get smoother for you, and if you are like me you will come to enjoy using this versatile program.

When you look at the main screen of this program, Photoshop has a different look (compared to ver. 4 which was the one I was using when I selected ver. 8). The screen is dark gray, and has a nice appearance. The tools are mostly in the same place, and I appreciated the addition of the "Selection Brush/Quick Selection Tool" on the side bar of tools. The sidebar of tools includes: Move, Zoom, Hand, Eyedropper, Marquee, Lasso, Magic Wand, Selection Brush/Quick selection, Type, Crop, Cookie Cutter, Straighten, Red Eye Remover, Spot Healing, Pattern/Clone Stamp, Eraser, Pencil/Brush, Smart Brush, Paint Bucket, Gradient, Shapes, Blur/Sharpen, and Sponge/Dodge/Burn tools. This is a nice assortment.

Once you get the image in the shape you are after you can then apply any of 98 different Filter options to add personal touches to your work. Then when you get ready to save you can save your image files in any of the following formats: .PSD, .PDD. .BMP, .RLE, .DIB, .GIF, .PSE, .EPS, .JPEG, ,JPG, .JPE, .PCX, .PDF, .PDP, .RAW,
.PCT, .PICT, .PXR, .PNG, .SCT, .TGA, .VDA, .ICB, .VST, .TIF or .TIFF.

Highly recommending, as long as you are willing to climb a moderate learning curve to figure a few things out.

5 stars!

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